Reflections on Jewish history, tradition

Max Shmookler Guest Writer

Healing begins at home. It begins on campus. It begins where we find ourselves, in this second Zion, in English, not Polish, nor Yiddish, nor Hebrew. It begins when publications like The Imperialist take lightly words that we know all too well, or choose to slander a group on campus under the pretense of “conservative” politics. And it begins when we ask, openly, publicly, why Jews are omitted from the list of groups “deserving” of provocation and attack. Why didn't The Imperialist caricature the Bayit as a ghetto? Why don’t Jews contribute to the “zoological” diversity of campus? By my count, their omission of the Jewish community does nothing to prove their affection for us Jews. To the contrary, it reveals the degree to which they perceive the Jewish center as more “welcoming”—i.e., less “other” and more straight and white—than ALANA and Blegen.

We Jews are the grandchildren of the Warsaw ghetto. As such, we inherit memories of overwhelming domination; memories of SS soldiers proceeding from block to block of the ghetto, torching the buildings, flooding the sewers and smoking the already-decimated population from their underground bunkers. But we also have access to the truly unspeakable courage, self-sacrifice, and ethical conviction of the Jewish ghetto fighters, who fought back with homemade bombs, pilfered rifles, and an illimitable spirit forged in the hopeless, but dignified, fight against extermination.

I look often at the few surviving photographs from the Nazi Grossaktion, invariably taken by Nazi officers as they scoured the ghetto. For me there is one that stands out from the rest—a picture of a young man, his gaze drawn across the length of the photograph, revealing his unshaven face. There is something so simple and defiant in his jutting hips, his raised hands in loose fists, and his untucked undershirts bunched around his waist as he marches with other prisoners toward the Umschlagplatz and his execution. I find myself imagining him to be one of the radiomen who broadcast the uncompromising edicts of the Jewish Fighting Organization in their last days. I can hear him, his voice fervent, ablaze, rising above the sounds of fighting, in desperate harmony with the ghetto fighters, partisans, communists, and anti-fascists across Europe. I can hear him as he reads from one of their final pamphlets:

“Life belongs to us too! We too have a right to it! We simply have to know how to fight for it! It is easy enough to live if they give you life as a gracious gift! It is not so easy when they want to snatch life away from you! Rise up, people, and fight for your lives!”

We Jews are the grandchildren of Warsaw—and we have forgotten the unequivocal lessons of our grandparents. We have forgotten, or never known, what it is to fight for life. We have succumbed to the gracious gift of life in the United States. Yuri Slezkine thinks the twentieth century was the Jewish century, but I disagree. I think the twenty-first century can be the Jewish century. A century of Tikkun Olam, or healing the world, that earns us this gracious gift of life stolen from our parents’ parents.

This makes us Jews the witnesses to, and beneficiaries of, the power of whiteness and heteronormativity, rather than the victims. We now have a choice, and it is an ethical choice. We can passively accept that Jewish is white and white is welcoming, thereby playing into the logic of The Imperialist. In choosing this path, we Jews can (and do) profit from cultural assimilation and white privilege on campus (and in the United States more broadly)—to the point where Jews are neither perceived as a “minority” on campus, nor perceive themselves as such. Or we can refuse, on ethical grounds, to be subsumed by white identity and silenced by the power it gives us. We can do so by urging our community leaders to raise their voices in protest and offer a statement of solidarity with the students of the ALANA center and Blegen House; and we can do the same in our personal lives. By speaking as Jews in support of these identity centers, we are also affirming the importance of the Bayit and our distinct Jewish identity. If doing so means we no longer blend in so easily as whites, and that we lose the comfort and power that being white affords us, so be it. The choice is unavoidable—we are either allies to students of color and LQBTQ students on campus, or we profit from our dissociation from them.

In affirming the importance of ALANA and Blegen, we honor our history of marginality and recover a form of Jewishness that is more than maternal bloodlines and gefilte fish—more than a particular ethnicity, race, or religion, but an ethical tradition that does not take lightly the gracious gift of life.